The Gyrls are Back in Town!Stump Girl, Bush Girl and Conifer Girl

All securely anchored in a planter outside the British High Commission80 Elgin Street, Ottawa

Got an antidote for sibling rivalry? Forget Oprah, the British Council would like to hear from you. They're figuring out where to put Stumpy 2. Nicked, roughed up, lost—it's all happened to Stump Girl and (some of it to) her twin (younger) sister, Stumpy 2.

Getting lost in Toronto for about three weeks en route, Stumpy 2 also managed to lose a leg. Healed of all her hurts now, all Stumpy 2 needs is an imaginative, safe, permanent home. The Council hopes the prizes—like chocolate from Harrod's, for instance—will inspire entrants.

"I know all her lumps and bumps," says Sally Verhey, Education Advisor at the British Council. Stumpy 2's glorious red shoes, complete with red bows, stand partially swathed in white polyester, stamped all over with small Union Jacks. Just like her sister, Stumpy 2's tree-trunk-like torso is gnarled and knobbley with a smattering of branch stumps. Standing in front of a large Union Jack, she made me forget Britannia ruling the waves. Stumpy 2's got her own thing happenin' ....but where? What will be her element, her domain?

Earlier this week she was unveiled indoors and her elder sisters, Stump Girl, Bush and Conifer Girl, re-unveiled outdoors, securely attached to their collective planter. This effectively restores the Brits permanent contribution to the city's public art.

"They were only out for two weeks before Stump Girl was nicked," says Sean Lewis, director of the British Council. That was in November 1998. In February 1999, Lewis commissioned the same artist, Laura Ford, for a replacement. At around four thousand pounds, Stumpy 2 wasn't cheap.

In the interim, "we found the original in May (1999) in Vanier," he adds. The guy in possession was "genuinely just a fall guy. I think somebody left it with him, knowing that he would always be smashed out of his head."

Garden statuary includes a motley crew of replicas of Michelangelo's David, various kinds of gnomes, pink flamingos and caricatured black people smiling widely in a seemingly ever-expanding range of servile roles. Stumpy2 and company make a curious addition to all this.

"The Nature Girls are woodland nymphs, nice attractive little bronzes, and on the other side depict something quite dark and bleak," notes Lewis. "Laura Ford's particular form of art is to depict empowerment in women. And what she's done with these is to make little elves as if they're hiding in the woods, but they really want to be seen - that's why they've got red shoes. On the other hand...these are girls who are lost in a very very bleak woodland."

"I think that her first child, her one and only child, turned up, I think, just after she'd made Stump Girl," Lewis adds, speaking of the thirty-something Ford. "She realizes now, that an only child is not a good plan, and she invented Bush Girl and Conifer Girl to keep it (Stump Girl) company. So ...there's probably some sort of maternal streak there, controlling her art."

The figures evoke the sometimes terrifying realities faced by children today, some of which—gun violence, for instance - perhaps children generally have not faced on this scale before. Ford manages to "hide" the girls in the trees, thereby protecting them, and yet it's their shoes that give them away.

The Stumpy twins in particular also reference the great English connection with the landscape as depicted and explored by people like J.R.R. Tolkein and Richard Adams. In a sense, Stumpy 2 and her sisters stand in for Tolkein's Treebeard, creating their own kind of Fangorn forest in a new millennium, one in which hopefully little girls are safe.

"Put her in the goal for the Sens! She'd do a better job." That's only one of the suggestions Sally Verhey has received so far. For prizes, Verhey has stuffed the traditional green plastic Harrod's shopping bag with approximately nine inch wide Belgian chocolate medallions, Scottish shortbread and other goodies. (Dear Readers, this is chocolate that might require redefining words like "sin".).

Is it an English thing for little girls to have red shoes? I can't recall not having any. I remember showing up at a garage sale at my sister's place in suburban Montreal some years ago. There, on a table, was a pair of my eldest niece's shoes with a tag attached that read, "$1". Classically styled with the single buckle strap at the ankle and the rounded toe (just like Bush and Confier Girls!), the tiny red shoes fit in the palm of my hand. To my utter relief, my bewildered sister handed them over but wouldn't take any money for them. Now, many years later, Kiran, my eight year old niece, has probably long forgotten them, but I haven't.

Her first pair of red shoes, a little dustier perhaps, still sits atop my bookcase, peeping out from behind the leaves of a spider plant.